The hard drives will randomly disconnect and reconnect. This is a huge problem when playing a game and it suddenly errors out because the hard drive will disconnect, then immediately reconnect.

I am going out to get some better SATA cables (these are questionable).

Any ideas why this would happen?

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Lack of TLER could do it. If the drive is trying to recover from an I/O error, if it takes too long the RAID controller will bump the drive out of the RAID. If you have the option to disable Patrol Read, do it. It always causes the non-TLER drives to randomly get kicked out of my RAID-5, then I have to wait for the entire damn thing to rebuild. If this has happened a lot, it is possible that data on your RAID-0 could be corrupted at this point. I would start doing some tests to make sure it's not the drives themselves.

One of your drives might have an error on a particular LBA. You can find out if you check the SMART logs and run a SMART Self-test (preferably a long run) and check the logs again after the test. Don't run the test multiple times or it will cancel the last one.

I recommend booting using a Ubuntu live CD, install smartmontools and run this on the drives:

You can install smartmontools by doing

Code:

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Checkout smart logs with:

Code:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX #replace X with the number of the drive.

To run a long test it will look like this:

Code:

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdX # once again, replace X with the number of your drive.